When Emma Taylor decided to change careers from graphic designer to a pastry chef, she knew one thing: Ice cream was going to be her focus.

"I love summer and I love ice cream," she beams. Born in the summer, her childhood in Cherry Hill was filled with ice cream birthday cakes, trips to the Ocean City boardwalk for Kohr’s custard with rainbow jimmies and ice cream sandwiches at home.

Inside her new, sleekly designed Milk Sugar Love Creamery and Bakeshop in Jersey City, Taylor had been hard at work since the early morning making ice cream in 1-gallon batches and countless trays of cookies for the ice cream sandwiches that have become the cornerstone of her business.

Since she started in the ice cream biz a year ago at farmers markets with a lone push cart, Taylor has been working on getting her sandwiches just the way she and her customers want them.PHOTOS: Milk Sugar Love Creamery and Bakeshop

For her own tastes, she wanted the thickness of the cookie to equal to the thickness of the ice cream. The sandwich needs to fit perfectly in your mouth.

"I spent way too much time thinking about this," she says with a laugh.

Her prepackaged ice cream sandwiches ($5) fit neatly in the palm of your hand because she found customers would rather have something petite. "They are not looking to ruin their dinner," she says knowingly. "They are looking to complement it."

When making prepackaged cookies, Taylor likes to bake the cookies a bit longer — assembly is easier with a firmer cookie. She also pipes the ice cream straight from the machine into 2½-ounce round molds.

When they are ready to assemble the sandwiches, they pop the ice cream right out of the molds and slide it between the cooled cookies.

Her graphic design background shows here. "I love a clean straight line. It’s a little too rustic for me if I scoop the ice cream and smash it together. I like my prepackaged sandwiches to look perfect."

She also prefers to build the sandwiches and let them age for a week in the freezer. The sugars in the ice cream begin to absorb and soften the cookie to a perfect consistency.

For those of us who don’t mind a rustic-looking sandwich or don’t have the discipline to wait a week while they age in the freezer, Taylor offers build-your-own sandwiches in the shop ($6). These are a bit bigger and could stand in for dinner in a pinch.

It gives the customer ultimate control. Choose your cookie. Choose your ice cream. Milk Sugar Love always has at least three kinds of cookies and 12 ice creams to choose from in the dipping cabinet.

The most popular ice cream sandwich at the shop is the chocolate chip cookie hugging Stumptown coffee ice cream. Part of the fun of ordering a build-your-own sandwich is the way Taylor serves it: She positions the cookies in a bowl like two halves of a shell and gently places a glistening pearl of ice cream between them. You can maneuver the ice cream between the layers as you like. Leave an overhang of cookie, so you can nibble it on its own at first, or patiently wiggle the cookies until the ice cream covers the cookie surface completely.

Taylor chooses to make her ice cream without eggs. Organic milk from grass-fed cows, sugar, a pinch of sea salt and high-quality ingredients combine into a deeply flavored yet lighter ice cream. This is a smart move when paired with buttery cookies.

She also uses local fruit as often as possible, the bulk coming from farmer Ed Huff from Asbury’s Central Valley Farm. "We get organic strawberries from him that are pesticide-free and ruby red when you bite into them," she says. She also features his blueberries in the sour cream blueberry flavor, which was sold out during the store’s grand opening last week.

Come together

After starting early in the morning and serving 450 free mini-cones at the big event in the afternoon, Taylor was still bustling behind the counter late in the evening, building ice cream sandwiches and wiping down the window over the ice cream flavors, singing with the radio.

During a free moment, Taylor slipped into the kitchen to check on things and stood for a moment smiling contentedly. Paper ice cream cone decorations framed her in the large window overlooking Hamilton Park, and passers-by could get a glimpse into the open kitchen.

On the radio, the Beatles play in the background. "One thing I can tell you is/You got to be free/Come together, right now/Over me."

Somehow, it seems like the perfect soundtrack for building ice cream sandwiches.
"The Gutsy Gourmet" appears monthly. You can reach Rachel Weston at njgutsygourmet@yahoo.com or The Star-Ledger, Savor/Today, 1 Star-Ledger Plaza, Newark, N.J., 07102. Twitter: @roxydynamite